My Spring Green Garlic Plan Has Sprouted
Realization Of The Day:
I can take 'Water newly planted beans & greens bed' off my To Do List for today.
It's been pouring for the past two hours. Over half an inch of rain and lots of thunder. Just yesterday we were talking about how (so far) this has been the oddest May either of us can remember. The rain is wonderful, and the plants and I absolutely love all these mild and cloudy days, but it feels kind of weird. Like something scary is in store for June. Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Beyond The Garden Gate
The grass is nice and thick in the fields thanks to all the rain, but those April days in the 90sF sent the cool season grasses right to seed. They should be several feet high and are instead about one. We'll hope for the best and cut whatever hay we can next month. In the meantime, the sheep are having a (ha ha) field day out there. So much yummy stuff to munch on, they are practically turning in circles. They're soggy (it is truly amazing how much water a thick woolly coat can soak up) but very happy.
The wild gooseberries are, as always, doing extremely well. I trounced through all kinds of big, healthy bushes while looking high and low for the missing, alien abducted sheep yesterday. (Sometimes there is simply no other explanation. Once the entire flock was taken for the night.) Too bad I cannot seem to aquire a taste for gooseberries--or even find a decent sounding recipe that calls for them.
On the other hand, wild blackberry blossoms are everywhere--and my all-time favorite pie is blackberry. But I know better than to get my hopes up yet. Although it was raining so hard earlier it was almost frightening (okay, okay, so I have a small, inexplicable fear of thunderstorms), unless we keep getting regular rainfalls during the next two months, all those beautiful blackberries-to-be will turn out to be nothing more than tiny, seedy, pathetic little specimens--if there is even any fruit at all. We only get a decent crop every few years, but when it's good, it's very, very good. Well worth wrestling the thorny brambles during what are always the hottest, most humid days of the year. Oh blackberry pie, my love, I'm dreaming of you already.
Rain has stopped. Storm over. Time to pull on my rubber boots and get out in the garden. Will be back to reply to your questions and comments later today.
Update: Oops. Got carried away with sheep stuff and ranting about NAIS in the comments section of this post. If you aren't familiar with the pending government program NAIS (National Animal Identification System), I urge you to check it out. If you eat, it affects you. And if you garden, you may even lose your source of organic manure! (See, this is serious.) Will hopefully be back to garden talk and comments tomorrow night.
You're remembering "earthquake weather" of the Bay Area. Not that MO doesn't have it's own major fault! I'm sure MO has it's own type of earthquake weather, too.
ReplyDeleteYou haven;t acquired a taste for gooseberries because you haven't had the right country recipe. My grandmother used to make the best gooseberry pie and cobbler ever! I'll have to get that recipe from my mother and give it to you.
ReplyDeleteYou will appreciate this heriloom seed business. It is close to where you live also. I buy all my seed for my garden and so do my folks.
ReplyDeleteThere is a great fall party for harvest time. It's in Mansfield, MO and the web address is www.rareseeds.com.
I came across your blog recently, just in time for the green garlic plan. Sounded like a great idea to me, so I duly planted some sprouting garlic I had lying about and mulched with a thick layer of grass cuttings. Spent several days congratulating myself on finding such a great blog, actually getting round to planting something and on how the grass cuttings had stopped my cats digging in the freshly turned earth. Went out on Sunday morning to find that our local fox had spent a very comfortable night sleeping on the luxury grass mattress I'd inadvertently constructed, breaking the tops off all my nice new garlic plants in the process! Still I've removed the grass now and it looks like most of them will recover.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the inspiration to plant them in the first place!